Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

Posts tagged with "Drug Assays"

Drug Assays

Experienced drug discovery folks, particularly those that work early on in the process, will tell you that aggregation is one of the most common sources of false positive “hits”. This happens when the molecule in question bunches up with others of its kind and makes a larger species, particles of something that has different properties… Read More

Drug Assays

Here’s an article (free access) in ACS Central Science on assay interference compounds, a contentious topic that has been aired here (and in many other places). This one, though, is authored by the editors-in-chief of all the relevant ACS journals and is appearing in all of them as well. People will argue about some of… Read More

Biological News

I’ve very much been enjoying this paper, on fragment-based chemogenomics in whole cells. That’s the sort of blurb, I admit, that’s probably going to make you immediately want to read the rest of the paper, or immediately go do something else (all the way up to “podiatrist appointment”). And I understand those impulses. Read More

Chemical News

The field of late-stage modification of complex structures has seen several advances in the last few years, and this is just the sort of thing that medicinal chemists tend to be interested in. We like one-step transformations (which organic chemist doesn’t!) and we tend to have large collections of compounds that have already been made. Read More

Drug Assays

Yesterday’s mention of carbohydrates brings up another topic, one that was raised in the comments and in some email correspondence. Most drug companies with an internal screening collection are concerned, to some degree, about how greasy that collection has turned out to be. The concern comes from the general perception that the more hydropho… Read More

Drug Assays

Michael Gilman has an interesting article up at LinkedIn about trying to get past the current small-molecule limits of medicinal chemistry. His suggestion is “Why not RNA?” This is not entirely crazy. Many approved antibiotics act by binding to ribosomal RNA. And Novartis’s fascinating splice-corrector LMI070, which is in clinical tri… Read More

Drug Assays

Here’s a warning about trying to write compounds off too quickly as PAINs (pan-assay interference compounds). The authors, from UNC-Chapel Hill, have gone through the PubChem database using software structural alerts for such motifs. Despite the original PAINs list being derived from AlphaScreen interfering compounds, they found that most of… Read More

Drug Assays

I think that most medicinal chemists look at the structure of ebselen and say “That’s not a drug”. Selenium atoms don’t belong in drugs, we figure, and Se-N bonds most certainly don’t. But it stands as a rebuke to our intuitions, because it’s been kicking around in the clinic for some time (and has certainly… Read More

Chemical Biology

I really enjoyed reading this article in J. Med. Chem. on curcumin. (Update: here’s the take over at Practical Fragments). That’s a well-known natural product, found in large quantities in turmeric root (which is where most of the yellow color comes from). It has, over the years, been a hit in many, many assays, and… Read More

Analytical Chemistry

Medicinal chemists like it when one enantiomer of a compound binds to a target much more than the other one. That tells you that you’re getting real binding to a protein target, and the bigger the difference between the two, the more you can say about the actual binding site. But is this always true?… Read More